Dan Q performed maintenance for GC7QG1Z Oxford’s Wild Wolf Three

This checkin to GC7QG1Z Oxford’s Wild Wolf Three reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Checked up on this cache as it’s been a long time without a find. All stages and the final cache are intact and well! Final stage easier to reach than during the summer, but long trousers still pretty essential! Log book still 50% “me”.

Left travel bug – help it on its way!

Dan with Wild Wolf Three's logbook

×

Dan Q couldn’t find GC6K31Q Thames Path – Picnic

This checkin to GC6K31Q Thames Path - Picnic reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Like the previous logger, I find evidence of the cache (see photo) but no cache. Unlike the previous logger, I’m not going to claim that as a “find”. Which it clearly isn’t, and claiming that it is makes it harder for volunteer community moderators to identify problem caches.

Nice spot, though. Hope you’re can be repaired!

Presumed former site of geocache GC6K31Q - rings on a tree

×

Note #17836

Keyboard with Pride rainbow function keys

With thanks to @wasdkeyboards, my new #keyboard can show some #Pride. 🏳️‍🌈

×

Mouth Dreams is so stupid and so good

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

For the sake of our own sanity, if nothing else, we wanted to take a minute to dig into the most wonderfully dumb song on the entire album—although technically it’s two songs, since tracks 13 and 14, “Fredhammer” and “Limp Wicket,” both share a single unifying sound: Limp Bizkit’s ode to heartbreak, “Nookie”.

Together, these two tracks cover so much of what makes Cicierega so great, from the unexpected sample choices, to the step-stuttering repetition of lyrics, to the moment when you realize he’s snuck the Seinfeld baseline into the middle of the song. There’s also the fact that the whole thing works irritatingly well, from Durst rapping over the “Sledgehammer” horns, to the undeniably triumphant feel of the “Yub nubs” kicking in.

I confess to a genuine and unironic love of Mouth Moods (and, to a lesser extent, Neil Cicierega’s other Mouth* work). I don’t know if I enjoy Mouth Dreams even more, but it’s certainly a close thing.

William Hughes succinctly describes what makes Mouth Dreams so good. I promise you that if you start down this rabbit hole you’ll soon be lost (what does it all mean? what are the secret messages hidden in the spectrogram output? why, just why?), but in the most wonderful way. You can listen to the entire album on Soundcloud.

COVID-19 and Acedia

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. COVID-19 has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.

What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building.

That’s what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia.

In a blog post far from his usual topics, Schneier shares a word – albeit an arguably-archaic one! – that captures the feeling of listlessness that many of us are experiencing as the coronavirus pandemic continues to unfold.

Accidental Geohashing

Over the last six years I’ve been on a handful of geohashing expeditions, setting out to functionally-random GPS coordinates to see if I can get there, and documenting what I find when I do. The comic that inspired the sport was already six years old by the time I embarked on my first outing, and I’m far from the most-active member of the ‘hasher community, but I’ve a certain closeness to them as a result of my work to resurrect and host the “official” website. Either way: I love the sport.

Dan, Ruth, and baby Annabel at geohashpoint 2014-04-21 51 -1
I even managed to drag-along Ruth and Annabel to a hashpoint (2014-04-21 51 -1) once.

But even when I’ve not been ‘hashing, it occurs to me that I’ve been tracking my location a lot. Three mechanisms in particular dominate:

  • Google’s somewhat-invasive monitoring of my phones’ locations (which can be exported via Google Takeout)
  • My personal GPSr logs (I carry the device moderately often, and it provides excellent precision)
  • The personal μlogger server I’ve been running for the last few years (it’s like Google’s system, but – y’know – self-hosted, tweakable, and less-creepy)

If I could mine all of that data, I might be able to answer the question… have I ever have accidentally visited a geohashpoint?

Let’s find out.

KML from Google is coverted into GPX where it joins GPX from my GPSr and real-time position data from uLogger in a MySQL database. This is queried against historic hashpoints to produce a list of candidate accidental hashpoints.
There’s a lot to my process, but it’s technically quite simple.

Data mining my own movements

To begin with, I needed to get all of my data into μLogger. The Android app syncs to it automatically and uploading from my GPSr was simple. The data from Google Takeout was a little harder.

I found a setting in Google Takeout to export past location data in KML, rather than JSON, format. KML is understood by GPSBabel which can convert it into GPX. I can “cut up” the resulting GPX file using a little grep-fu (relevant xkcd?) to get month-long files and import them into μLogger. Easy!

Requesting KML rather than JSON from Google Takeout
It’s slightly hidden, but Google Takeout choose your geoposition output format (from a limited selection).

Well.. μLogger’s web interface sometimes times-out if you upload enormous files like a whole month of Google Takeout logs. So instead I wrote a Nokogiri script to convert the GPX into SQL to inject directly into μLogger’s database.

Next, I got a set of hashpoint offsets. I only had personal positional data going back to around 2010, so I didn’t need to accommodate for the pre-2008 absence of the 30W time zone rule. I’ve had only one trip to the Southern hemisphere in that period, and I checked that manually. A little rounding and grouping in SQL gave me each graticule I’d been in on every date. Unsurprisingly, I spend most of my time in the 51 -1 graticule. Adding (or subtracting, for the Western hemisphere) the offset provided the coordinates for each graticule that I visited for the date that I was in that graticule. Nice.

SQL retreiving hashpoints for every graticule I've been to in the last 10 years, grouped by date.
Preloading the offsets into a temporary table made light work of listing all the hashpoints in all the graticules I’d visited, by date. Note that some dates (e.g. 2011-08-04, above) saw me visit multiple graticules.

The correct way to find the proximity of my positions to each geohashpoint is, of course, to use WGS84. That’s an easy thing to do if you’re using a database that supports it. My database… doesn’t. So I just used Pythagoras’ theorem to find positions I’d visited that were within 0.15° of a that day’s hashpoint.

Using Pythagoras for geopositional geometry is, of course, wrong. Why? Because the physical length of a “degree” varies dependent on latitude, and – more importantly – a degree of latitude is not the same distance as a degree of longitude. The ratio varies by latitude: only an idealised equatorial graticule would be square!

But for this case, I don’t care: the data’s going to be fuzzy and require some interpretation anyway. Not least because Google’s positioning has the tendency to, for example, spot a passing train’s WiFi and assume I’ve briefly teleported to Euston Station, which is apparently where Google thinks that hotspot “lives”.

GIF animation comparing routes recorded by Google My Location with those recorded by my GPSr: they're almost identical
I overlaid randomly-selected Google My Location and GPSr routes to ensure that they coincided, as an accuracy-test. It’s interesting to note that my GPSr points cluster when I was moving slower, suggesting it polls on a timer. Conversely Google’s points cluster when I was using data (can you see the bit where I used a chat app), suggesting that Google Location Services ramps up the accuracy and poll frequency when you’re actively using your device.

I assumed that my algorithm would detect all of my actual geohash finds, and yes: all of these appeared as-expected in my results. This was a good confirmation that my approach worked.

And, crucially: about a dozen additional candidate points showed up in my search. Most of these – listed at the end of this post – were 50m+ away from the hashpoint and involved me driving or cycling past on a nearby road… but one hashpoint stuck out.

Hashing by accident

Annabel riding on Tom's shoulders in Edinburgh.
We all had our roles to play in our trip to Edinburgh. Tom… was our pack mule.

In August 2015 we took a trip up to Edinburgh to see a play of Ruth‘s brother Robin‘s. I don’t remember much about the play because I was on keeping-the-toddler-entertained duty and so had to excuse myself pretty early on. After the play we drove South, dropping Tom off at Lanark station.

We exited Lanark via the Hyndford Bridge… which is – according to the map – tantalisingly-close to the 2015-08-22 55 -3 hashpoint: only about 23 metres away!

The 2015-08-22 55 -3
Google puts the centre of the road I drove down only 23m from the 2015-08-22 55 -3 hashpoint (of course, I was actually driving on the near side of the road and may have been closer still).

That doesn’t feel quite close enough to justify retroactively claiming the geohash, tempting though it would be to use it as a vehicle to my easy geohash ribbon. Google doesn’t provide error bars for their exported location data so I can’t draw a circle of uncertainty, but it seems unlikely that I passed through this very close hashpoint.

Pity. But a fun exercise. This was the nearest of my near misses, but plenty more turned up in my search, too:

  1. 2013-09-28 54 -2 (9,000m)
    Near a campsite on the River Eden. I drove past on the M6 with Ruth on the way to Loch Lomond for a mini-break to celebrate our sixth anniversary. I was never more than 9,000 metres from the hashpoint, but Google clearly had a moment when it couldn’t get good satellite signal and tries to trilaterate my position from cell masts and coincidentally guessed, for a few seconds, that I was much closer. There are a few such erroneous points in my data but they’re pretty obvious and easy to spot, so my manual filtering process caught them.
  2. 2019-09-13 52 -0 (719m)
    A600, near Cardington Airstrip, south of Bedford. I drove past on the A421 on my way to Three Rings‘ “GDPR Camp”, which was more fun than it sounds, I promise.
  3. 2014-03-29 53 -1 (630m)
    Spen Farm, near Bramham Interchange on the A1(M). I drove past while heading to the Nightline Association Conference to talk about Three Rings. Curiously, I came much closer to the hashpoint the previous week when I drove a neighbouring road on my way to York for my friend Matt’s wedding.
  4. 2020-05-06 51 -1 (346m)
    Inside Kidlington Police Station! Short of getting arrested, I can’t imagine how I’d easily have gotten to this one, but it’s moot anyway because I didn’t try! I’d taken the day off work to help with child-wrangling (as our normal childcare provisions had been scrambled by COVID-19), and at some point during the day we took a walk and came somewhat near to the hashpoint.
  5. 2016-02-05 51 -1 (340m)
    Garden of a house on The Moors, Kidlington. I drove past (twice) on my way to and from the kids’ old nursery. Bonus fact: the house directly opposite the one whose garden contained the hashpoint is a house that I looked at buying (and visited), once, but didn’t think it was worth the asking price.
  6. 2017-08-30 51 -1 (318m)
    St. Frieswide Farm, between Oxford and Kidlington. I cycled past on Banbury Road twice – once on my way to and once on my way from work.
  7. 2015-01-25 51 -1 (314m)
    Templar Road, Cutteslowe, Oxford. I’ve cycled and driven along this road many times, but on the day in question the closest I came was cycling past on nearby Banbury Road while on the way to work.
  8. 2018-01-28 51 -1 (198m)
    Stratfield Brake, Kidlington. I took our youngest by bike trailer this morning to his Monkey Music class: normally at this point in history Ruth would have been the one to take him, but she had a work-related event that she couldn’t miss in the morning. I cycled right by the entrance to this nature reserve: it could have been an ideal location for a geohash!
  9. 2014-01-24 51 -1 (114m)
    On the Marston Cyclepath. I used to cycle along this route on the way to and from work most days back when I lived in Marston, but by 2014 I lived in Kidlington and so I’d only cycle past the end of it. So it was that I cycled past the Linacre College of the path, around 114m away from the hashpoint, on this day.
  10. 2015-06-10 51 -1 (112m)
    Meadow near Peartree Interchange, Oxford. I stopped at the filling station on the opposite side of the roundabout, presumably to refuel a car.
  11. 2020-02-27 51 -1 (70m)
    This was a genuine attempt at a hashpoint that I failed to reach and was so sad about that I never bothered to finish writing up. The hashpoint was very close (but just out of sight of, it turns out) a geocache I’d hidden in the vicinity, and I was hopeful that I might be able to score the most-epic/demonstrable déjà vu/hash collision achievement ever, not least because I had pre-existing video evidence that I’d been at the coordinates before! Unfortunately it wasn’t to be: I had inadequate footwear for the heavy rains that had fallen in the days that preceded the expedition and I was in a hurry to get home, get changed, and go catch a train to go and see the Goo Goo Dolls in concert. So I gave up and quit the expedition. This turned out to be the right decision: going to the concert one of the last “normal” activities I got to do before the COVID-19 lockdown made everybody’s lives weird.
  12. 2014-05-23 51 -1 (61m)
    White Way, Kidlington, near the Bicester Road to Green Road footpath. I passed close by while cycling to work, but I’ve since walked through this hashpoint many times: it’s on a route that our eldest sometimes used to take when walking home from her school! With the exception only of the very-near-miss in Lanark, this was my nearest “near miss”.
  13. 2015-08-22 55 -3 (23m)
    So near, yet so far. 🙄
Rain in Lanark, seen through a car window
No silly grin, but coincidentally – perhaps by accident – I took a picture out of the car window shortly after we passed the hashpoint. This is what Lanark looks like when you drive through it in the rain.
× × × × × × × ×

Automattic Retrospective (days 207 to 334)

Last year, I accepted a job offer with Automattic and I’ve been writing about it every 128 days. I’ve talked about my recruitment, induction, and experience of lockdown (which in turn inspired a post about the future of work). I’ve even helped enthuse other new Automatticians! Since my last post I’ve moved house so my home office has changed shape, but I’m still plodding along as always… and fast-approaching my first “Automattic birthday”! (This post ran a little late; the 128-day block was three weeks ago!)

Dan in his home office (links to an interactive 360° panoramic photo with info points).
If you missed it the first time around, click through to explore an interactive panoramic view of my workspace. It’s slightly more “unpacked” now.

As I approach my first full year as an Automattician, I find myself looking back on everything I’ve learned… but also looking around at all the things I still don’t understand! I’m not learning something new every day any more… but I’m still learning something new most weeks.

This summer I’ve been getting up-close and personal with Gutenberg components. I’d mostly managed to avoid learning the React (eww; JSX, bad documentation, and an elephantine payload…) necessary to hack Gutenberg, but in helping to implement new tools for WooCommerce.com I’ve discovered that it’s… not quite as painful as I’d thought. There are even some bits I quite like. But I don’t expect to fall in love with React any time soon. This autumn I’ve been mostly working on search and personalisation, integrating customer analytics data with our marketplace to help understand what people look for on our sites and using that to guide their future experience (and that of others “like” them). There’s always something new.

Alpha project planning meeting via Zoom.
I suppose that by now everybody‘s used to meetings that look like this, but when I first started at Automattic a year ago they were less-commonplace.

My team continues to grow, with two newmatticians this month and a third starting in January. In fact, my team’s planning to fork into two closely-linked subteams; one with a focus on customers and vendors, the other geared towards infrastructure. It’s exciting to see my role grow and change, but I worry about the risk of gradually pigeon-holing myself into an increasingly narrow specialisation. Which wouldn’t suit me: I like to keep a finger in all the pies. Still; my manager’s reassuring that this isn’t likely to be the case and our plans are going in the “right” direction.

Kudos to Dan "for resolving a weeks worth of project issues in one day".
Our “Kudos” system can be used to acknowledge other Automatticians going above and beyond. I was particularly proud of this one.

On the side of my various project work, I’ve occasionally found the opportunity for more-creative things. Last month, I did some data-mining over the company’s “kudos” history of the last five years and ran it through vis.js to try to find a new angle on understanding how Automattic’s staff, teams, and divisions interact with one another. It lead to some interesting results: panning through time, for example, you can see the separate island of Tumblr staff who joined us during the acquisition gradually become more-interconnected with the rest of the organisation over the course of the last year.

Automattic Kudos social graph for September 2020
Automattic as a social graph of kudos given/received during September 2020, colour-coded by team. Were you one of us, you’d be able to zoom in and find yourself. The large “branch” in the bottom right is mostly comprised of Tumblr staff.

The biggest disappointment of my time at Automattic so far was that I’ve not managed to go to a GM! The 2019 one – which looked awesome – took place only a couple of weeks before my contract started (despite my best efforts to wrangle my contract dates with the Bodleian and Automattic to try to work around that), but people reassured me that it was okay because I’d make it to the next one. Well.. 2020 makes fools of us all, I guess, because of course there’s no in-person GM this year. Maybe, hopefully, if and when the world goes back to normal I’ll get to spend time in-person with my colleagues once in a while… but for now, we’re having to suffice with Internet-based socialisation only, just like the rest of the world.

× × ×

Displaying ProtonMail Encryption Status in Thunderbird

In a hurry? Get the Thunderbird plugin here.

I scratched an itch of mine this week and wanted to share the results with you, in case you happen to be one of the few dozen other people on Earth who will cry “finally!” to discover that this is now a thing.

Encrypted email identified in Thunderbird having gone through ProtonMail Bridge
In the top right corner of this email, you can see that it was sent with end-to-end encryption from another ProtonMail user.

I’ve used ProtonMail as my primary personal email provider for about four years, and I love it. Seamless PGP/GPG for proper end-to-end encryption, privacy as standard, etc. At first, I used their web and mobile app interfaces but over time I’ve come to rediscover my love affair with “proper” email clients, and I’ve been mostly using Thunderbird for my desktop mail. It’s been great: lightning-fast search, offline capabilities, and thanks to IMAP (provided by ProtonMail Bridge) my mail’s still just as accessible when I fall-back on the web or mobile clients because I’m out and about.

But the one thing this set-up lacked was the ability to easily see which emails had been delivered encrypted versus those which had merely been delivered “in the clear” (like most emails) and then encrypted for storage on ProtonMail’s servers. So I fixed it.

Four types of email: E2E encrypted internal mail from other ProtonMail users, PGP-encrypted email from non ProtonMail users, encrypted mail stored encrypted by ProtonMail, and completely unencrypted mail such as stored locally in your Sent or Drafts folder
There are fundamentally four states a Thunderbird+ProtonMail Bridge email can be in, and here’s how I represent them.

I’ve just released my first ever Thunderbird plugin. If you’re using ProtonMail Bridge, it adds a notification to the corner of every email to say whether it was encrypted in transit or not. That’s all.

And of course it’s open source with a permissive license (and a doddle to compile using your standard operating system tools, if you want to build it yourself). If you’re using Thunderbird and ProtonMail Bridge you should give it a whirl. And if you’re not then… maybe you should consider it?

× ×

Tiled Slackmoji

Stupid thing of the day to try on your favourite Slack channel:

1. Make an image of yourself bordered by the edge of a speech bubble. Make the image an exact multiple of 32 pixels in each dimension (this one is 128 × 96):

Cartoon Dan's head with a speech bubble sticking out in Paint.net

2. Use ImageMagick to cut the image into 32 × 32 pixel tiles, e.g. like this: magick convert dan-qs-stupid-head.png -crop 32x32 "dan-q-says-%02d.png". Pick a sensible output filename to use as a Slack emoji shortcode.

3. Log into Slack and customise your emoji by adding each of the tiles you’ve created to it. This is where you’ll be glad you named the file sensibly because it saves you typing the shortcode out each time.

Uploading custom emoji into Slack

4. Type a message using your custom emoji! Because it sits in-line with text, you can type alongside or around it (unlike normally embedded images or /giphy integration) along with styling, mentioning, and hyperlink options. You can also copy-paste and edit on-the-fly, so you can keep a copy of the message in your self-channel and adjust whenever you need.

Dan's Slackvatar says: "Hi there! You can have a Slackvatar do your talking for you too!"

5. Profit!!!

Why not make a whole set of different faces showing your different emotions – perhaps from photos – so you can react appropriately to your colleagues! Slack don’t seem to impose any limit on the number of custom emoji you can add, so the only limit is your imagination (and the tolerance of your Slack administrator for such high jinks).

Or why not cut up an animated GIF? Slack preloads emoji into the client so they play in-sync, allowing you to run animations that span multiple emoji?

× × ×

An Intense Day On Crib Goch

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Hiking vlogger Dave shares his expedition around the Snowdon Horseshoe back in March. It’s a fantastic ridge walk that I’ve taken a few times myself. But on this particular expedition, hampered by strong winds and thick cloud cover, a serious accident (very similar to the one that killed my father) occurred. Because Dave was wearing his GoPro we’ve got amazing first-hand footage of the work he and the other climbers on the hill that day did to stabilise the casualty until mountain rescue could come and assist. The whole thing’s pretty epic.

Speaking of which, did you see the jet-suits that are being tested by the Great North Air Ambulance Service? That’d have made getting to my dad faster (though possibly not to any benefit)! Still: immensely cool idea to have jet-propelled paramedics zipping up Lake District slopes; I love it.